Caregivers like you need Beauty in your life each day. Amid the ugliness of the illness & struggles of people you serve there may be days on which it is especially hard to touch that beauty.

   What grounds you? Beauty offers herself.

   In beauty there is hope. In hope lives life & love.

   Everytime I try to think of writing something of my own for you I find myself unable to match anything as remarkable as what John O'Donohue (1956-2008) offers (emphasis added):

   In Greek the word for 'the beautiful is to kalon. It is related to the word kalein which includes the notion of 'call.' When we experience beauty, we feel called. The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life. The call of beauty is not a cold call into the dark or the unknown; in some instinctive way we know that beauty is no stranger. We respond with joy to the call of beauty because in an instant it can awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness.

   I stop my quote of O'Donohue here so as to permit each of us to reflect on Beauty as a call – a gentle, passionate & eternal friend.

-Erie Chapman

photo: "Ruffled Water" by Erie